1/25/2012 @ 6:00PM

Nuke Us!

Bob Forrest is known for a lot of things in Carlsbad, a quiet city of 25,000 on the edge of New Mexicos empty, endless Chihuahuan Desert. He was mayor here for 16 years. Hes chairman of the local bank and owns the spanking new Fairfield Inn, which sits next to the new Chilis and the new Wal-Mart.

And he helped bring 200,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste to town.

Thats not a bad thingat least not here. Unlike thousands of other places in America, where the thought of trucking in barrels of radioactive garbage from atomic weapons plants would lead to marches, face paint and, invariably, pandering politicians (witness Nevadas stalled Yucca Mountain project), Carlsbad has a different take. Its really a labor of love, says Forrest. Weve proven that nuclear waste can be disposed of in a safe, reliable way.

This attitudeYes in my backyard, if you willhas brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine. Unemployment sits at 3.8%, versus 6.5% statewide and 8.5% nationally. And thanks to this projecteuphemistically known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPPNew Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad. WIPP is the nations only permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. The roads have to be good for the two dozen trucks a week hauling in radioactive drums brimming with the plutonium-laden detritus of Americas nuclear weapons production.

Before WIPP the areas economy was mostly limited to potash mining, oil and gas drilling, and a passel of tourists stopping on the way to ­Carlsbad Caverns, an hour south. The Department of Energys $6 billion program created 1,300 permanent jobs, many of them high-paid engineering positions. Energys annual budget for WIPP is $215 million, much of which stays in the community as wages. The leaders of neighboring Lea and Eddy counties have doubled down on the nuke biz, establishing a 1,000-acre atomic industrial park. ­Already uranium fuel maker Uren­co Group has built a $3 billion fabrication plant there, employing 300. More amenities followed, too: In November Carlsbad ­inaugurated the Bob Forrest Youth Sports Complex. We are not blinded by the jobs, says John Waters, director of the department of economic development for Eddy County. We know what we have. We know the risks. We have a very educated public.

But if Carlsbads story showcases the upside of being willing to do the nations dirty work, it also demonstrates how difficult it can be to get the chance to do so. Since opening in 1999, WIPP has operated so smoothly and safely that Carlsbad is lobbying the feds to ­expand the project to take the nuclear mother lode: 160,000 more tons of the worst high-level nuclear waste in the countrythings like the half-melted reactor core of Three Mile Island and old nuclear fuel rodsthat are residing at aging nuke plants a short drive from wherever youre sitting right now.

Yet thanks to politics even more radio­active than the material itself, it hasnt happened yet and might not happen anytime soon. Though taxpayers have already spent some $12 billion mining out and engineering Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, power brokers in Nevada fought the congressionally approved project from the get-go. Bowing to Nimbyand Nevadas powerful Senator Harry Reidtwo years ago President Barack Obamas Administration declared Yucca DOA. Contractors have since laid off some 1,000 workers there.

To seek some common ground Obama then set up the Blue Ribbon Commission on Americas Nuclear Future. The BRC, as its known, is tasked with looking at all the options. It likes WIPPa lot. According to its draft report last summer the BRC will insist that a consent-based approach be applied to any future site selection. WIPP, it wrote, is a model of how that can be done.

Cue the politics. New Mexico, in agreeing to WIPP, required that Congress enshrine in law a promise that the feds would not send high-level waste into the state. WIPP wont be the next Yucca unless that issue is wrangled, and reversed, by Albuquerque, Washington or anyone else with skin in the game. If they pay any attention, that is. Im absolutely incredulous that so few opinion makers even know that WIPP exists, says former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, who sits on the BRC and is a friend of Forrest.

Photograph: Chip Simons

Still, science appears to be on the boosters side. Carlsbad has a Goldilocks geology that is the best solution yet found for entombing nuclear waste safely. Yucca Mountains volcanic tuff is prone to cracks and faults from seismic activity, which might, over thousands of years, let water seep in. Salt, on the other hand, is nearly impervious to seismic activity, quickly healing any cracks or faults and remaining completely impermeablewith no way for any water to get in or for any radiation to escape. Carlsbad sits atop the biggest salt deposit in America, stretching from New Mexico clear to Kansas. It was deposited 250 million years ago in the Permian period, when the seas receded from the shore of the ancient continent Pangea. The salt has lain undisturbed ever since.

In the 1970s the Department of ­Energy floated the idea of mining out a nuclear repository in the salt under centrally located Lyons, Kans. The people didnt want it; Three Mile Island didnt help. Carlsbad made more sense; its 3,000-foot salt layer is the thickest in the country. And the state has a nuclear history as home to the Manhattan Project. The Los Alamos and Sandia national labs continue to do a lot of nuclear work. Whats more, the people of Carlsbad know salt; theyve been mining it since 1930 to go after seams of potasha mineral in high demand as fertilizer.

Carlsbads current mayor, Dale ­Janway, worked for 30 years as a safety director at the Intrepid mine, which he describes as an underground city with a claustrophobic warren of tunnels and rooms. All told, Carlsbads potash mines hold more than 1,000 miles of tunnels covering 100 square miles. Compared with going after potash, says Janway, digging a spacious mine to hold drums of waste is easy. The miners were all for it.

Forrest and other Carlsbad leaders saw what billions in federal investment could do for their townand their businesses. Forrest moved to Carlsbad in the 1940s; his father started a chain of tire shops, Forrest Tires. Today, in addition to the Fairfield Inn, his family owns the aging Best Western hotel nearby and controls Carlsbad National Bank, of which hes chairman of the board. Having grown up selling tires, says Forrest, Ive been a salesman all my life, and WIPP is something Ive sold. He rejects the idea that hes the face of WIPP. We dont really have a face; our whole group supports it so heavily. Dinner with Mayor Janway and dozens of other pro-WIPP Carlsbadians on steak night at the Elks Lodge backs him up.

Still, it wasnt easy to sell WIPP to the rest of the state. Folks in Albuquerque and Santa Fe didnt see why they should allow trucks to traverse their roads with other states waste. When Forrest in 1990 took busloads of Carlsbadians to Albuquerque for hearings on the plan, protesters threw rocks at the bus. A common sign at the time in the windows of Santa Fe and Taos art galleries: Another business against WIPP.

To win them over, the Energy Department brought its custom-built waste-hauling canisters to Albuquerque for punishing tests. Dropped from 30 feet onto concrete slabs, smashed into steel spikes, broiled for 30 minutes in a jet-fuel infernonothing fazed them. New Mexicos then Representative Bill Richardson (later governor) dragged his feet on WIPP; Senator Domenici pushed for it in Washington. At last Energy agreed, and Congress decreed that no high-level waste would be brought to WIPP. No big deal: Congress had already ordered that stuff sent to Yucca.

Forrest says Carlsbad and DOE have contended continuously with 15 different oversight groups throughout the construction and operation of WIPP. We were in a fishbowl. They were consulted on anything that ­happened at WIPP, says Forrest. I dont have a problem with it, but you couldnt run a business like that.

On Mar. 26, 1999 the townsfolk of Carlsbad gathered to cheer the first truck to deliver waste to WIPP. Then, as now, it passed through barbed-wire gates and armed guards to deposit its load in one of a series of giant hangar buildings, the most secure of which has concrete-reinforced walls 4.5 feet thick. Inside, past the airlocks, I was half-expecting workers in moon suits, but its just jeans and steel toes. The drums they handlefilled with scraps of machinery, rags, sludge and clothing contaminated with plutonium have been packed at the Energy Departments labs in Idaho and South Carolina. You can stand next to most drums without concern. Others are so hot they can only be handled by heavily shielded machines.

The drums final resting place is down an elevator 2,150 feet into the salt. Its dark, dusty, dry. Unlike Carlsbad Caverns, there are no stalactites or stalagmites and no dripping water. WIPPs tunnels and rooms have 15-foot ceilings, enough to stack drums three high. So far its swallowed 10,200 shipments totaling 200,000 tons impregnated with 5 tons of plutonium. To get that stuff to WIPP drivers have logged 12 million miles with loaded trucks and 10 million miles empty. Drivers work in pairs when hauling full loads and cant get hired if theyve ever had a traffic ­violation. There have been three ­accidents in 13 years. In the worst, a driver jackknifed with an empty load. The waste container performed as designed, detached from the truck and rolled to a stop. No damage.

Photograph: Chip Simons

Likewise, only a few mishaps down in the salt. In 1995 a worker broke his leg in an electric cart accident. In 2008 a forklift operator gouged an inch-long gash in a drum. No radiation escaped the thick plastic bag inside. None has escaped WIPP, either. All the air that circulates out of the WIPP buildings passes through HEPA filters. Carlsbads monitoring center picked up heightened levels of radioactive iodine in the air weeks after Japans Fukushima disaster but hasnt yet sniffed any leakage from WIPP.

WIPPs salt tomb is a simple, passive solution to a tough problem. Contrast that with Yucca, which requires active engineering to work. Though the mountains volcanic tuff is three times stronger than concrete, it features lots of cracks and faults that could allow water to slowly trickle through. Over thousands of years those trickles could pick up radiation and carry it into groundwater. To cope, Energy Department engineers designed a drip shield that would deflect the water. To resist thousands of years of corrosion, however, the shield would have to be made from titaniumso much titanium that it could be irresistible to future scavengers. One person who has worked on both Yucca and WIPP says the titanium solution would negate a primary objective of a repository: ensuring that people leave it alone. If its 1,000 years from now and the U.S. doesnt exist, and I dont know what that titanium is protecting, Im gonna go get it. In contrast, even if future generations wanted to dig down a half-mile, theres nothing at WIPP worth poking around for.

Whats more, building out Yucca to hold 100,000 tons of high-level waste would cost on the order of $80 billion, figures Jim Conca, a consultant with RJ Lee Group who previously worked as director of repository science for the Energy Department. Entombing the same waste in a WIPP 2.0 would cost less than $30 billion. The feds have already collected nearly that much from nuclear reactor owners for the Nuclear Waste Fund. Only in salt is the annual revenue from the fund sufficient to accomplish this program without additional taxes or rate hikes, says Conca.

Even if the moneys there, and the will, theres still a lingering question of how the salt would react when in contact with canisters of high-level waste, 600 degrees hot. New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez has said she tentatively supports expanding the mission of WIPP but only on the condition that science must be the decision maker. What could go wrong?

Trapped within the salt are microscopic pockets of 250-million-year-old seawater. Because heat increases the solubility of salt in water, the more heat, the more salt dissolved. One theory suggests that high heat will attract nearby water toward the waste canisters, potentially corroding them. Ned Elkins, Los Alamos labs chief salt repository scientist, who works at WIPP, says all current modeling indicates that neither the heat nor water should pose any significant problems, but we have to let the science speak for itself, to erase all doubt. The DOE has begun a $40 million study to prove it out, but conclusive results will take at least three years. I sure hope it doesnt take that long, says Senator Domenici. So close and yet so far.

Good thing Forrest and crew have plenty to work on while they wait. Theyve already attracted Urenco and its fuel plant to their nuclear industrial park. Now theyre seeking to build a surface-level facility to store used nuclear fuel rods in 100-ton, 15-foot-tall steel-and-concrete casks. Many reactors already use these dry casks to free up room in their cooling ponds. Theyre impervious to attack; crashing a plane into one would be as effective as throwing an egg at a fire hydrant. If the counties manage to guide that project through regulatory hurdles, their next dream is to attract a reprocessing plant, which would take the 95% of energy still left in old rods and turn it into new ones. France and Japan do this, but the practice is banned in the U.S. because it yields tiny volumes of ultrabad waste that could be devastating in the wrong hands.

Congressman Steve Pearce (RN.M.) remains more circumspect, reflecting the doublespeak that Nimby coerces: Im supportive, but everything said today might have to be unsaid tomorrow. Theres the politics of the nation, politics of state, politics of local, and all have to align.

Pearce says hes focused on making sure theres enough funding for WIPP to do its original job. The Energy Departments budget for the project has fallen in recent years from $250 million to $215 million; last year WIPP contractors shed 130 workers; those who remain are handling fewer shipments and less waste than before.

Does this make any sense? Once its here and down that hole, the storage costs at other facilities go down dramatically, says a Department of Energy official, pointing to the 21 nuclear facilities across the country that have been cleaned up entirely after their waste was shipped to WIPP. There are nine sites left. They should save money for the nation by sending us stuff as quickly as possible.

Forrest finds the whole thing ridiculous. Its the obvious choice. We want this to be the next Yucca Mountain; we are tired of waiting, he says. The way he sees it, WIPP has proven itself to be an ideal resting place for the stuff, while the people of Carlsbad have proven that theyre comfortable with it. The federal government, he says, should jump at the chance to shut the book on Yucca. We are addressing a national issue, says Forrest. Why is this such a hard sell?

On JAN. 18 FORBES contributor Joel Kotkin wrote

Two Americas, At War With Each Other

America has two economies, and the division increasingly defines its politics. One, concentrated on the coasts and in college towns, focuses on the business of images, digits and transactions. The other, located largely in the Southeast, Texas and the Heartland, makes its living from agriculture manufacturing to fossil fuel development. Traditionally these two economies coexisted without interfering with each other. Thats changing. The Obama Administrations move to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is a classic expression of the conflict. The Nimby model suffers severe limitations. For one thing, these highcost areas lag in creating middle-skilled jobs; New York and San Francisco, for example, have suffered the largest percentage declines in manufacturing employment of the nations 51 largest metropolitan areas. Indeed with the exception of Seattle, the Nimby regions have all underperformed the national average in job creation for well over a decade. If the Nimby regions want to maintain their values, that should be their prerogative. But stomping on the potential of other, less fashionable areas seems neither morally nor socially justifiable.

MACWELL RESPONDS Americans have allowed a small minority to dictate what the rest of us can eat, drink, smoke, where we can go and how we must live. Its because of career politicians. These so-called representatives of the people, who only care about their next election, trade votes like so many baseball cards regardless of how their votes affect Americans.

DWAINWR RESPONDS Joel, while I agree with everything that you say about America having two different economic cultures, that has little to do with Obamas decision to block the Keystone pipeline. Obama blocked it primarily because it would cross through the Ogallala Aquifer, predominately in Nebraska. There were substantial objections to the pipeline from farmers and ranchers in Nebraskahardly a group of postindustrial urbaniteswho were concerned about water contamination.

MICHAELSONDERGARD SAYS I see it as an economic war between those who want the United States to fail and those who want to see the United States succeed. Plenty of people in this country are embarrassed about our wealth and success. Our power and influence in world affairs needs to be diminished. Our military is too large. For decades weve plundered the worlds resources and polluted our precious Earth. Weve been BAD! Our current Community-Organizer-In-Chief falls into this group.

PJSAUBER SAYS Wow, you buy the Obama socialist antibusiness redherring lies line hook, line and sinker.

When it comes to doing the countrys dirty work, Carlsbad is hardly alone. Hard-pressed areas across the country are coming to the grown-up conclusion that they will never become hotbeds for venture capital or attract Stanford or
Google
(or even
Toyota
) to open a satellite campus. Instead, theyre inviting indestructible and inescapable industries, like prisons, dumps and oil and gas drilling to town–fostering Yes In My Backyard success in a Nimby nation. Theres big parts of the country that dont want to get their fingers dirty, says FORBES contributor Joel Kotkin, the renowned demographer and author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Penguin Press, 2010). In prime Nimby states like New York and California, says Kotkin, they dont want growth; they want asset inflation.

The dichotomy is biggest in states enjoying oil and gas booms brought about by the hydraulic fracking revolution. Since 2009 Pennsylvania has seen gas-drilling jobs explode from 60,000 to 160,000 and related economic activity jump from $4.7 billion to $13 billion a year. North Dakota has an unemployment rate of just 3.5% (lowest in the U.S.), and in the past year has seen oil and gas employment increase 39% and construction jobs 20%. In contrast, in New York State, where the state budget is an annual apocalypse and the economy is ever more beholden to Wall Streets boom-and-bust cycles, politicians still cant muster the will to shoulder the risks and allow gas fracking, though studies show it would create 40,000 jobs in some of the states most depressed regions–for 30 years. California could solve its fiscal problems if it unlocked its oil and gas, but just try to permit anything in Santa Barbara, says Kotkin. Not everyone in America is afraid to get their hands dirty. Here are five Yimby capitals:

WILLISTON, N.D.

UNEMPLOYMENT: 2.5%

Boom Town for the Bakken Shale, Williston is drawing workers from all over the nation. Oilfield hands make more than $100,000 a year. The number of drilling rigs is up fivefold in two years.

HOUSTON, TEX.

UNEMPLOYMENT: 7.6%

Laissez-faire zoning laws make it easy to tear down old and build new. Houstons port complex hosts massive refineries, while busy factories build the gear that feeds the shale gas boom.

PINAL COUNTY, ARIZ.

UNEMPLOYMENT: 10%

It might be better named Penal for its half-dozen privately operated prisons that employ thousands. The ranks of the unemployed are swelled by families of inmates who move nearby. The county is also wooing
Union Pacific
to build a giant rail yard.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

UNEMPLOYMENT: 6.9%

Governor John Kasich is a fracking fan and booster for gas drilling in the Utica Shale. Shell Oil is thinking of building a world-scale petrochem plant there, while Vallourec and
ArcelorMittal
have recently ramped up steelmaking.

NEW ORLEANS, LA.

UNEMPLOYMENT: 6.5%

A cap-ex boom has followed in the wake of destruction left by Hurricane Katrina. Steel giant
Nucor
is building a new $3.4 billion furnace complex in St. James Parish that will eventually employ 1,000.